Let us take a trip down memory lane to summer 07. The parentals freak out about the predicted rise in electricity prices ten trillion years from now, and decide to get solar panels installed. This is all well and good, unless you like your power hard & fast.

Back to the present day, it's winter and incredibly cold. Rules are inplace regarding heater usage to prevent brownouts, which thanks to the geniuses who did the wiring, only ever seems to effect my bedroom and the hallway.Today is also the day the estranged elder sibling has decided to return home from her self imposed exile. Having been away for practically ever, she was unfamiliar with the heater guidelines, and decided to turn everything on. This resulted in a return of the dreaded brownout, and subsequently my computer shat itself. Upon restart, i blue screened. Next restart was fine, until eveything started installing itself. It at this time i knew something was terribly wrong. I opened device manager, and all drives bar the boot were missing. I tried chkdsk, windows disk manager, manufacturing software, recovery software and i just can't pick them up. I thought it might be motherboard, so i put a drive in another computer and couldn't even get it to spin up.

In summary: My hardware is dead and data seems lost, so i'll have to buy a bunch of new crap and spend all weekend reinstalling windows and associated programmery.

NB: I have zero money, no time to do this, and i'm not allowed to use my heater so i'm cold.

Power blowouts are a horrid thing for us computer dependant peoples.I remember once at a LAN back in my home town, we were renting out the town hall (don't ask me how highschool students managed to hire out the town hall for a LAN). In the middle of the night, as one particular guy was going psycho over Counter Strike (you know, the type who decides he's the God of the game and thus, every time his team is decimated, the game must finish), power cuts off thanks to a semi-distant lightning storm. Around 70% of people there found themselves spending the next day of the LAN reinstalling everything on their HDD.

I was lucky - I dropped out of the game quickly because I was sick of already-spoken-of psycho going off his nut at everyone, and my computer was unplugged to make room for his laptop. I like to think there was some karma involved there.

Logged

Just in case people were wondering, it stands for 'At The Convenience Of The Experimenter.'

My goodness gracious me.I loathe power outages especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere. However, what I hate more is the fact that out where the parentals live there are only two options. Extremely expensive Next G Wireless Internet or....satanic Dial-Up. So my parents being the tight-arse country people that they are, they have opted to stay on dial-up.

So when I stay at my parents joint, I end up on this extremely slow, depressing internet speed that just makes me want to destroy things. However, this is now the only set back to going back to visit the folks, and this point is relevent to the evilness of siblings.

My younger sisters decide that it's fun to play with water while they are around my laptop. At one point during one of my stays, my sisters were fighting over an open bottle of water and managed to dump ATLEAST 3/4 of the bottle all over my poor poor laptop. I watched this entire act happen and it was as though it all occured in slow motion.

I don't know what was worse. Watching my computer being covered in water OR the fact that my sisters stared at me stupidly and started laughing. LUCKILY, my laptop was able to survive. Hooray for TOSHIBA. Oh how I adore thee.

Anyways I know that I have gone completely off topic, but power outages, failing of computer AND siblings are all evil. EVIL I SAY!!!

My goodness gracious me.I loathe power outages especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere. However, what I hate more is the fact that out where the parentals live there are only two options. Extremely expensive Next G Wireless Internet or....satanic Dial-Up. So my parents being the tight-arse country people that they are, they have opted to stay on dial-up.

So when I stay at my parents joint, I end up on this extremely slow, depressing internet speed that just makes me want to destroy things. However, this is now the only set back to going back to visit the folks, and this point is relevent to the evilness of siblings.

My younger sisters decide that it's fun to play with water while they are around my laptop. At one point during one of my stays, my sisters were fighting over an open bottle of water and managed to dump ATLEAST 3/4 of the bottle all over my poor poor laptop. I watched this entire act happen and it was as though it all occured in slow motion.

I don't know what was worse. Watching my computer being covered in water OR the fact that my sisters stared at me stupidly and started laughing. LUCKILY, my laptop was able to survive. Hooray for TOSHIBA. Oh how I adore thee.

Anyways I know that I have gone completely off topic, but power outages, failing of computer AND siblings are all evil. EVIL I SAY!!!

Oh word.

Until the end of last year, we were in the same boat. Satellite, Dial-up or insane NextG. Dialup wasn't even 56k, we had to use 28.8 if we wanted any sort of consistency. So we took up the governments hibus offer, and got cashback on one-way satellite (we weren't eligible for 2-way subsidy. Apparently 28.8 is good enough) So we got sat, and the fees were like $80 a month for 512/56k with a 3gb limit. Then telstra rang up one day and were all 'we upgraded your insanely corroded copper wire' and we can get ADSL now. For the same price, we get double the speed & 8 times the bandwith. Winner!

Also, i finished fixing computer. I upgraded the mobo while i was at it, so i can replace the processor when the funds gain some steam. I bought 2 500gb HDD's, and a 250gb external to sync with important docs. Spent all weekend reinstalling windows, but everything seems to be purring now.